The Impossible Thingby John McGroarty

Genre:DramaSwearwords: None.Description:PART FOUR: ​​Just when he is finding true happiness, a phone call pitches a Spanish journalist back into the darkness of despair.

​​​It was early on the Sunday morning that I received the phone call from Dani. I was still sleepy-eyed and found it hard to focus on what he was saying. He told me that the new start-up newspaper Tiempos de España online had published a story about little Victor. It claimed that there was no record of his illness in the hospital in Barcelona and that the clinic in Los Angeles had never been contacted by his parents. What it really said in so many words was that it was all an elaborate confidence trick. I suddenly had a deep feeling of dread. I saw Alberto’s smiling face in my head. Looking at me suspiciously and then when he saw that I was a useful idiot going into the act. He was smarter than me. A lot smarter. That I had judged everything by appearance. That I had turned off my cynical radar. The most important gift of the journalist. Had let my guard down. My madness had taken control of my duty. I had broken the oath of Francis of Sales in the stupidest way. I now saw it all quickly and clearly. I had been completely taken in. I don’t know why but I thought about Chinatown. Probably because Cristina has been calling me Jake Gittes for so long. Because she says I am a detective always looking for something other than what there is. All that there can ever possibly be. How it’s impossible to understand anything. That is the real impossible thing. The world has no longer any use for martyrs or messiahs. The dread turned to shame. Deep crimson cardinal folly shame running down my spine. Cutting into the roots of my hair and my beard and covering my whole body in a cracked cherry skin coating. My ears burned and my heart pounded and my guts wrenched and I had to get out of the room and down into the anonymity of the street. I walked madly for hours going round and round trying to get the thoughts out of my head. Trying to get their faces out of my head. Trying to exorcise all the stupid things I had said on TV. The conversations I had had with my colleagues and friends and people who trusted me. Then it came to me that the police would become involved. That they would think I was an accomplice. Hadn’t I opened up the online payment account? Been one of the faces of the campaign.? If not for money then for what? Because I am a mad neurotic who wants to do good in the world? Because of an existential crisis? Because I wanted to show that the impossible was possible? Who would believe that nowadays? Perhaps the police would think I was the ringleader. Alberto and Mónica would act dumb. Say I had put them up to it. They were poor desperate people. Play the ignorant peasant and leave me to carry the whole can. The media would have a field day. This is the sort of thing they love. The thing we all love. The scapegoating and pillorying in the public market place. I saw myself tarred and feathered. Publicly flogged and humiliated. All the people of all the countries venting their spleen on me. Hating me. Contempt. Derision. Mockery. And then from somewhere, quite unexpectedly, there came a laugh. Like the crack of a whip. A deep rolling and thundering laugh that seemed to come from inside me but also from the universe. The deep black empty universe. From far off in the cosmological sea of stars and space. From the cosmological happiness machine in my brain. It was the absurd laugh. I had read about it before. In Camus. The laugh Sisyphus defies. The empty laugh. The beginning of freedom. I went into a café and bought a small beer and sat at a table watching the people come and go. I felt happy. But a different happy. A joy is the word. Happy watching the people come and go. Seeing that I was one of them. That the universe laughed at me. At the way it laughs at us all. I too was an absurd hero. Cristina was right: I was a martyr. And now that I had been discovered in all my vileness and stupidity I would fulfil my destiny. I would get my martyrdom. And with it, I suddenly realised, full freedom. I laughed now out loud. Laughed in hysterics for five minutes in full view of everyone in the bar. They watched me for a minute and then turned away and continued with their things. With their own impossible things and I was left alone with my laughter and my absurdity. Just me. Another absurd creature who despairs and laughs and faces all the real things of the universe like all have before and all will in the future. With this the dread and the shame left and all that was left was the absurd impossibility of it all. I turned on my mobile and saw that I had many missed calls and WhatsApp messages. I phoned Cristina and we arranged to go back to Barcelona to face the music. In the end it wasn’t that bad. My true friends understood better than I thought they would. There was a certain human camaraderie to it all. What I had really been lacking all my life. Alberto and Mónica were arrested and charged with fraud. The papers did indeed have their field day. It lasted seven days. Just like the years of illness in the magic mountain. Seven is that magic number. It turned out that Alberto had a long history of chicanery and scamming. It was in his blood. His DNA. The police treated me more as a dupe than an accomplice and laughed openly when I explained everything about my mad ideas to change the world. When they stopped laughing they shook their heads sadly and I went home. My editor went ballistic but showed his human side and didn’t sack me. He just told me to take some time off. An extended leave of absence, he said; go and be Truman Capote somewhere far away for a while. And that’s what I did. I packed up and went to Capvern. Left that very evening and drove non-stop through the night

So here I sit looking out of my hotel window down onto the square. Six weeks have gone by since I left Barcelona. It’s winter now and all is covered in a thick white blanket of snow. I eat lunch and dinner with skiers and winter sportsmen. They look at me and wonder what species of man comes to this place not to ski. I do some online work for the magazine to earn my keep and trudge through the snow around the village for exercise and watch old movies down in the cinema on the square for entertainment. I have abandoned my cosmological happiness utopian book forever and started another. This one is dystopian. More in line with the spirit of the age. It’s called The Writer at the End of Time. It’s about the logical outcome of reason and the end of our human world but I don’t think I will ever finish it. I read somewhere many years ago that the Greeks divided all human stories into two kinds: tragedies and comedies. In the tragedy there is a change in the world through the actions of the characters and the gods and in the comedy nothing changes and the gods are indifferent. I am unsure which type this story falls into. I incline towards the latter. I do believe that that is what I will try to write from now on. Or perhaps it’s all the working out of a completely different kind of topia. An ectopia. A displacement. Maybe that’s my secret and my meaning. I have always lived in a state of displacement from all the ordinary things of life. A banishment. An exile. That it all comes from when I was a child. But that is another story. For which I do not have the strength. From this magic mountain top I have watched the behemoth continue to grow and I fear that it has only just begun. That even my absurd hero from the park can’t hold it back. I don’t know what to do or how to act only that complete rendition and freedom brings absurdity and laughter. So I’m back where I started. But maybe we all have to pass through that before anything will get better. When you completely lose faith in people, then you are really in the uncharted dragon-filled land and I fear some other impossible thing is bubbling up in the fires and cauldrons of the world down below. Outside in this transient nowhere place the cloudbanks are high and the sky is pale blue and the sun shines. I have joined the choir. We rehearse three times a week and I have discovered, to my delight, that I have a good singing voice. It will be Christmas next week and Cristina is coming. We will put on a special concert on Christmas Eve. You are all invited. To raise up your voice in tragedy and in absurdity and in laughter. And perhaps, I hope, someday in joy, too.

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About the Author

​John McGroarty was born in Glasgow and now lives in Barcelona, where he works as an English teacher. He has been writing short stories for many years. His long short story, Rainbow, his novel, The Tower, and his two short fiction collections, Everywhere and Homo Sacer, are all McStorytellers publications.